by Ws Greer
“Should be about ninety seconds now,” Nix reminds me as he adjusts himself in his seat, the adrenaline beginning to pump throughout his massive body.
I smile to myself as the seconds tick by, knowing we’re about to grab a ton of money, and Nix and I have come so far in this game that we don’t have to do anything but sit here and watch our money come to us. We’ve come a long way from Cash N Check.
It’s almost time, so I look out of Nix’s window to see if there is anything suspicious happening. No cops, no pedestrians too close for comfort, no security guards from Hyperion taking a smoke break. With Nix’s side clear, I turn to my right and look out my own window. It’s there that something catches my eye. It’s not a cop or a security guard or a civilian who might try to become a hero. It’s a woman.
Her skin is pale and flawless, and her blonde hair glows in the Philadelphia sun as she approaches the parking lot we’re sitting in wearing a black leather jacket with skin-tight blue jeans. She has her hands in her pockets as she walks towards us, but I can’t quite make out her facial features just yet. She’s still too far away. I find myself fixated on her as she comes closer, and even though I can’t see her clearly yet, my mind fills in the blanks for me.
Reina.
I feel my heart surge. My skin flushes red under my black sweater and black denim pants, and I can feel myself losing control of my breathing as the excitement, fear, and anger start to boil in my stomach, sending mixed emotions shooting through my veins. What is she doing here? After all this time, this is how I see her again? Walking down the street without a care in the world, still living in the city we knew each other in?
Suddenly, memories come rushing back to me like a levee has broken and the waters are flooding in, the current too strong for me to do anything about it. All I can do is drown within my own mind as I see Reina and me standing within the narrow walls of the alley next to Aaron’s Arcade. I see the way she looks at me with those heart-stealing blue eyes and I feel like I’m right back in that moment, my soul being snatched out of my body. I see the two of us climbing the stairs of her parent’s gaudy house and ending up on her gigantic bed, living in each other, becoming one beneath her soft white sheets. I see us leaving the scene of a crime as Nix and I run out of Julia’s Jewels with bags full of money and jewelry, and I remember the way I felt as I looked at her in the rearview mirror and saw the focus and determination in her eyes as she drove us out of there, right after she had risked herself being an accessory by getting out of the car and distracting a cop that had walked by as we were getting ready to exit the building with tons of evidence in our hands. I remember how it felt, and it shakes me to my foundation as she approaches, nearly visible now.
“What the hell is going on?” I hear Nix mutter, but I’m too hypnotized by the approaching woman to really register what he said.
She keeps coming, and I keep staring, completely forgetting what I’m supposed to be paying attention to. My heart pounds under my clothes, but I’m sure it’s still visible to Nix. Reina left my house one day and never came back. Not one single text, not one phone call. She disappeared out of my life and I was never the same again. How could she do that to me, and then just show up here out of the blue? It’s like a fantasy of some sort—better yet, it’s a twisted nightmare, and I realize that now as the woman takes another long step and her face becomes clear.
“Wait, what the hell?” Nix barks, but I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I’m still watching the woman come closer, and I feel my heart drop into my stomach when my brain finally realizes it’s not her. It’s not Reina. The woman comes into view and I see her eyes are brown, her nose is the wrong shape, and she doesn’t have the angelic glow I remember Reina having from the moment I first saw her. It’s not her, but just thinking that it could’ve been was enough to break my heart all over again, not to mention break my attention away from what I was supposed to be watching unfold at Hyperion.
“Solomon, what hell? Come on!” Nix yells at me, and I turn around to see him getting out of the vehicle.
My mind finally snaps back into place and I look to see what’s gotten him so hyped up. My eyes go berserk as I frantically scan the area, trying to see what’s going on. I look directly across from us at the bank, and I don’t see the truck there. No one is outside of the bank, there are no cops. No flashing red and blue lights. It’s quiet and calm, just like it has been all day. What’s the big deal? The delivery truck isn’t at the bank, but I look and see Rock and the rest of the crew standing outside of his Escalade with stunned expressions on their faces as they look out at the road leading to the bank. There, in the middle of the street is the black armored truck that’s supposed to be coming to us, but instead, it’s stopped down the road, all of the doors are open, and the two deliverers are face down on the concrete road with their hands behind their heads, their tan shirts and black pants flapping in the breeze as they lay on their stomachs in the middle of all the confusion around them.
“What the fuck?” I hear myself say as I watch it all unfold. The truck is being hit by someone else.
There’s another crew dressed in all-black, waving around AR-15s at every vehicle in the road dumb enough to get too close to the crime scene. Four men are standing on each corner of the armored truck, guns pointed at traffic, forcing them to stop and turn around. The two delivery boys are being held at gunpoint by a man each, and as I’m watching it all, four men hop out of the back of the truck with duffel bags that look stuffed full of cash. As they hit the ground, one of them makes a circular signal with his arm, and every single one of them turns on a heel and runs for a black van with blacked-out license plates. It took them less than sixty seconds to make it all happen. It’s like they took our plan, and upgraded it with heavy artillery and more bodies. How the hell? What the hell?
Five seconds later, as bewilderment freezes me and my crew in place to do nothing but watch, the van is pulling away from the scene while the deliverers lay there on the ground, unmoving. After the van is gone, pedestrians and drivers get out of their vehicles to check on the scene, and I see people scrambling to pull out their phones, obviously dialing 9–1-1. It’ll only be a second before the sirens start to wail, so I know we’ve got to get out of here.
Nix stands about thirty yards in front of me, still stuck in a stare as he realizes our heist has been hijacked right in front of our eyes, and there’s nothing we could’ve done about it. He just stands there with his hands at his sides as Rock and the rest of the crew look at us for direction. I’m not sure what to say to anybody, but then a thought hits me like a punch from Mayweather.
“Hey, we’ve gotta go!” I hear Rock shout as he starts to get back in his SUV, followed by the rest of the crew.
“Where’s Tim?” I ask, low at first, but louder the second time as I look down the street next to the bus stop he was supposed to be sitting in. “Where is Tim?”
Nix looks over at the bus stop and he sees what I see. The armored truck is already passed the bus stop Tim is supposed to be in. He was supposed to text Rock and me when the truck approached and passed him, but we never heard from him. He never texted, and he’s nowhere to be found. Nix turns and looks at me over his shoulder as it dons on all of us. Nix was right. Tim played us.
I WANT HIM found. I want him dead.
After the heist-gone-wrong yesterday, the crew split up and went their separate ways—Donny and Ricky going back to boosting cars like they were doing the day we contacted them to meet us at Club Aslyum, Rock went back to who-the-hell-knows, and Marcell went back to being the evil genius he is, probably in some lab computing ways to hack the online bank accounts of the closest major corporation. Nix and me, however, we’re on to a different job—finding Tim Sandusky and the people responsible for taking our money. My money.
As I pace around my loft, I can’t get the image of the heist being stolen from me out of my head. I can still see myself standing behind Hyperion Bank with my mouth wide open, jaw nearly touc
hing the ground as I stood in awe of the robbery being carried out right in the middle of Girard Avenue by a crew of at least ten, wearing all-black and aiming AR-15s at passersby like they didn’t have a care in the world, as if everyone around them was totally irrelevant—and that ‘everyone’ included me. This is the kind of thing that can never be allowed to happen. This is not how kings are treated, and I’m a king. I’m the king. Whoever did this is going to pay, and there’s going to be a ton of interest on that payment that’ll come in the form of someone’s life, starting with Tim Sandusky!
I manage to raise a foot from the place it seemed cemented to in front of the enormous window overlooking downtown Philly, and walk over the dark hardwood flooring, past the red couch and loveseat and into the kitchen. I walk past the red barstools that are tucked under the bar counter and open a dark gray, custom-made cabinet next to the stainless steel refrigerator where I keep all of my liquor. I stare at the glass bottles displayed in front of me as if they’re my best friends in the whole world, but I’m disappointed that I have to choose one over the others. I eye them all, bypassing the row of Italian liquors, although the Fernet Branca and Amaretto call out to me. I scan over the row of Russian vodkas and decide I’m not in the mood for anything like that, and decide to go with a big boy drink on the top row of the four-shelf cabinet. After a deep breath, I reach for the decorative glass bottle of Bowmore 1957. It’s not every day a man decides to drink from a one-hundred-sixty-five-thousand-dollar bottle of scotch, but tonight is a special night, because I’m a special kind of pissed off. I grab a short glass from the cupboard, drop in two cubes of ice, and let the expensive scotch pour over the cubes, my mouth already watering from the look of it. I pour in two fingers worth and immediately knock it back, letting the liquid burn my throat so good all the way down, and I already feel a little calmer. After a breath to steady myself, I pour in three fingers, replace the cap on the bottle and walk over to the living room, where I sit down on the red couch and rest my glass on top of a coaster sitting on the edge of the marble end table.
Once I’m settled, I let my mind replay the scene over and over again until I’m sick from it. I see the black van waiting for the job to be stolen from me, the delivery boys lying face down on the hot concrete with their fingers interlocked behind their heads as if being instructed by the police, and the empty bus stop where Tim was supposed to be standing. We haven’t heard from him since the whole thing went down, so I’m left to assume that he had everything to do with how our job was stolen from us. I imagine him selling our entire plan to someone else, and it sets my blood on fire with rage. He is going to pay, I swear it. If he even has half an IQ, he’ll get out of Philly right now, and even then, we’ll find him. But the real question is who the hell he told about what we were going to do, because whoever it was, they pack some real fire power. It takes titan-sized balls to stand in the middle of the city and wave an AR-15 in broad daylight.
So who could it have been? I sip my drink and let my mind go to work as I stare straight ahead at my blank seventy-inch TV resting on it’s own marble table. I’ve heard of some up and coming crews from Mantua in West Philly who supposedly are making quite the name for themselves, robbing mom and pop stores in the neighborhood and doing some light extortion, but this feels too big for a crew that isn’t established yet. That’d be like Nix and me robbing Hyperion when we were sixteen. I had the balls to think of it, but there’s no way we would’ve had the means to pull something like that off.
There’s a bigger crew out of Hunting Park, but just like the gang in Mantua, they’re just too new. When your crew hasn’t even made it out of the hood yet, you don’t have enough experience, money, or clout to pull off a job like Hyperion. No, this is something much bigger than a neighborhood gang trying to come up. This is a crew who is established. This is a crew who has a ton of money and connections, and there’s very few I can think of who could do something like this and make it look so effortless, but there are a couple. There’s one in particular, actually, and if it’s them, everything is going to change. I won’t hold my tongue on it anymore, regardless of what Nix or Mason says. It’ll mean war. Admittedly, I’ve yet to know war. I’ve had my share of street beefs, to say the least, but not an all-out war between everyone I call an associate and whoever has gotten on my bad side. It’s something that excites me to my very core! I can only imagine what it would feel like to go to war with a worthy opponent, so I can let them watch everything they love burn to the ground around them as they die. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s hoping I’m right.
After knocking back the rest of my drink, I place the glass on the coaster a little harder than I mean to and it lets out a sharp crack. I can’t help it, really. I’m so frustrated that all of this happened, and sitting here waiting for Nix to contact me isn’t helping. The image of those four guys jumping out of the back of the armored truck with duffel bags stuffed full of my money haunts me like the ghost of Christmas past, but there’s something else that’s sticking with me, too. For the first time in my life, I let myself get distracted.
I’ve been doing this a long time, and there isn’t a person in the world who is better at being bad than me, but just before things started to go down, I saw something that was like kryptonite to Superman. I close my eyes and I can still see it. She walked towards us wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans. Her blonde hair was swaying behind her as she stepped, and for just a moment, I was convinced it was her. Reina. Even sitting here thinking about her now, I feel a rush of unidentifiable emotions racing through my veins like I’ve just taken a hit of ecstasy. I don’t know if it’s love or hate that fuels my heart, forcing it to pump hard and fast, but I feel every bit of it, and it nearly knocks me over, even as I sit soundly on my couch.
I haven’t let myself think about Reina in years. After she left Strawberry Mansion without saying a word, it took about a year to force myself to stop thinking about her every single day. It was like I had to play tricks on myself just to learn how to let her go—to let an hour go by without thinking of her face or her hair or her smile. I had to keep myself busy by hustling, figuring out what jobs Nix and I could hit as fast as we could. It was my need to get over Reina that drove me to become the kingpin I am today. When thoughts of Reina crept into my mind, I worked. When I missed her, I worked. When I needed to feel her, to smell her, to taste her, I got on my grind, schemed, plotted, and worked. I pulled off job after job with Nix, nearly driving him crazy with my obsession, but I needed it. I needed to get out of Strawberry Mansion, no doubt. I needed to get out of Whitney’s house, for sure. But I needed to get over Reina more than anything else. I hungered for it, and it was that hunger that led me here. As funny as it sounds, I guess I have Reina to thank for my success, even though she wasn’t there to help me to it the way I thought she would be. Then again, maybe she was always there, in the back of my mind, in my heart, surging me forward, telling me just how great I could be. Maybe what I needed was to be as big as she always knew I could be.
Regardless of all that, I know I have to get over it. The woman I saw outside of Hyperion wasn’t Reina. She was just some cheap knockoff version with the wrong color eyes! Damn it! It wasn’t her, so I have to do whatever I have to do to get over what I thought I saw. Reina isn’t here. She’s still just as gone as she was when my mother died. She’s just as gone as she was when I avenged Whitney’s death by committing my first murder. She’s still gone, and I can’t allow myself to be weakened by thoughts of her, so when my phone rings, I find comfort in knowing it’s Nix. It’s work, and I’m anxious for the distraction.
“Put a smile on my face, Nix,” I say as I place the phone to my ear. Nix clears his throat the way he always does when he has news, and I can already feel my smile forming.
“Meet me outside,” Nix says, and I can hear his own excitement coming through the other end. “I found Tim.”
Germantown is in Northwest Philly, about a ten minute drive from where I grew up in
Strawberry Mansion, and just like the rundown neighborhood I was born in, Germantown is a hellhole. It’s a low income neighborhood that’s been trying to get better over the years, but the crime and drugs in the place have kept it down, just like Strawberry Mansion. As Nix and I drive through the streets, I recognize the familiar symptoms of a poor neighborhood where people commit crimes to feed their families. On one corner there’s a liquor store, where five or six downtrodden people stand outside and sip from their brown-paper-bag-covered bottles right in front of the store, stumbling and slurring their speech. On the other side of the street is a gun store, ready and waiting for any person with enough cash to waltz right in and get themselves some ammo. Places like this and Strawberry Mansion are kept this way on purpose, which is why every ghetto or bad neighborhood is never in short supply of liquor stores, gun stores, and rundown schools. Just driving through here reminds me of how I lived in my mother’s house, struggling to keep from giving up and killing myself simply to avoid feeling the shame and sadness of being perpetually broke. Every dilapidated house is a reminder of my past and how I fought, scratched, and clawed my way out of it all. But I have to push those thoughts aside, as lovely as they are, because driving through Germantown isn’t about me. Germantown is about Tim.